Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 76203 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 381(@200wpm)___ 305(@250wpm)___ 254(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76203 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 381(@200wpm)___ 305(@250wpm)___ 254(@300wpm)
I was bound, sure. But in the front.
I could open a window.
Then I could, you know, just… throw myself out of it. Hope I landed well. And run.
Run where, I had no idea.
But, surely, there would be people around. Someone would see a gagged and bound woman, and do the right thing.
I had to believe that.
Pulling my knees inward, I tucked them under me.
My head spun.
And I worried for a moment about my head injury.
I couldn’t reach back to touch it, but the ever-present throbbing, and the wet sensation on my skull made me think that I had some sort of open wound there.
A concussion?
Worse?
Would I live through this at all?
No.
I had to stop that.
I needed to focus.
As I thought that, I heard a door slam, dragging my attention to the side where the bedroom door was still firmly closed.
Someone was outside there.
And they would be coming for me eventually.
For nothing good, I was sure.
I knee-walked closer to that door, gaze focused on the little silver lock. My pulse quickened as I rose my bound hands upward, my fingers closing on the lock.
I swear the sound seemed to be amplified loud enough to wake the dead as I slid it into the horizontal position.
I wasn’t naive enough to think that would protect me for long. Criminals picked locks, didn’t they? Hell, my mom used to have to unlock my sister’s bedroom door when she was little and throwing a fit.
If my mom could unlock it with a screwdriver, whoever kidnapped me surely could too.
It was just a stall tactic.
While I got to the window.
Got it open.
Then got out.
Even as I started to move away again, though, I heard voices.
“The fuck do you think you’re doing, Gray?” a woman’s voice called, loud, unconcerned about being overheard.
Gray.
Gray?
As in Gav’s brother?
The guy who…
The guy who made the merch for the gym.
The same boxes of merch I handled daily.
“Cleaning up the mess,” Gray responded to the woman as I heard the hiss of a can opening.
“How is a woman in my son’s bedroom cleaning up the mess?” she shot back, and there was something… familiar about her voice. I couldn’t quite place it.
“Well, we can’t have her out there, talking to her fancy lawyer, putting shit together, can we? He’s already sniffing around too much. Saw his investigator taking a tour of the gym,” he added, piquing my interest. I didn’t know that. Was that even legal? But, I guess, no one would know what was or wasn’t legal more than a lawyer.
“But she’s here,” the woman hissed. “Leaving her DNA all over the place.”
“Well, I guess you’ll have to fucking clean for once in your life,” Gray snapped.
I didn’t know who the woman was.
And I knew she was in on this.
But I somehow sympathized with her for having to put up with such an asshole.
“Says the man whose entire apartment is covered in old food and shower is so moldy, there’s no way to get clean inside of it,” she shot back.
Despite myself, I felt myself nodding.
Good for you.
“Being a bitch isn’t helping right now. I’m trying to think.”
“Must be hard for you. Try not to overheat.”
A snort escaped me at that before I snapped myself out of it, and forced myself to stand. I felt wobbly for a second before my legs seemed capable of leading me over toward the window.
Peering out, my stomach dropped.
We seemed high.
Or maybe I was just being a chicken.
It was definitely the first floor of a house.
The fall just looked like it could easily break a bone or five if I landed wrong.
But it was likely better than whatever Gray had in mind for me.
The voices on the other side of the door were rising, an argument that sounded less like two coworkers and a lot more like an unhappy couple.
I hoped their fighting would drown out the sound of the window as I grabbed it with the tips of my fingers, the position unnatural and difficult.
“You can’t kill her!” the woman snapped, making my head swivel to stare at the wall they were on the other side of. “That’s just going to show the police that other people are involved.”
“She’s gotta die,” Gray said, making my stomach turn over and twist.
“Well,” the woman said, and any solidarity I felt toward her as a woman dissipated as the next words left her mouth. “Yeah. But… but what if it looked like a suicide. Or an… accident. She’s dealing drugs, right? Who’s to say she isn’t using them?” she asked.
That was what they were going to do to me.
Inject me with heroin, so it looked like I was overwhelmed by the stress of going to trial and being convicted on drug charges, and I accidentally took too much, and overdosed.
Ridiculous, useless tears flooded my eyes.
Would that be a painful way to go?